


xxvii. okay, who had natural disasters on their 2020 bingo card?

by tempestaurora



Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [27]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Earthquakes, Fluff, Gen, Multi, Post-Canon, Power Outage, Sibling Bonding, Whump, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:20:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27233377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestaurora/pseuds/tempestaurora
Summary: After an earthquake, New York's power goes out.The Umbrella Academy kids, a year after stopping the apocalypse, spend it together.
Relationships: Allison & Ben & Diego & Number Five | The Boy & Klaus & Luther & Vanya, Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz, Minor/Mentioned: - Relationship, Raymond Chestnut/Allison Hargreeves, Sissy Cooper/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930186
Comments: 24
Kudos: 172





	xxvii. okay, who had natural disasters on their 2020 bingo card?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KittenAnarchy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittenAnarchy/gifts).



> Prompts: Earthquake | Power Outage
> 
> okay i don't want anyone to be mad at me, the tag CLEARLY STATES the romantic relationships are all mentioned/minor and not current in this fic. it's a year after they've returned to their own timeline (i imagine right after the 1960s, no sparrows etc.), and they're just talking about those relationships, they don't actually feature properly don't get mad for me putting it in the tags i'm just an organised tagger ok
> 
> this fic came from KittenAnarchy's prompt about a power outage and the umbrella kids just,,, spending time together

“Are you kidding me, Vanya?” Diego yelled over the shaking and rumbling and sounds of the very foundation of the mansion being tested.

“This isn’t me!” Vanya shouted back. Dust scattered down from the ceiling and the television turned to static. The earthquake shook through the mansion and the better part of New York, sending car alarms screaming and streetlights flickering.

Where Klaus and Luther had been standing, now Klaus cowered _beneath_ Luther, who’d taken up a spot in the doorway. Vanya had scrambled under the table and Five had blinked to join her there, as Diego had hauled Allison away from beneath the chandelier to the bar on the far side of the room.

“Are you _sure?_ ” Klaus called, from where he held onto Luther’s leg like a koala.

“Yes, I’m sure!” she huffed. “This! Isn’t! Me!”

Next to her, Five shrugged. “It’s a fair guess, V.”

“Not you, too.”

“Hey.” He raised his palms in surrender. “You caused the last _three_ doomsday scenarios is all I’m saying.”

She glared at him. “You’ll eat your words when the _next_ doomsday scenario is caused by—by Diego or something.”

Five shot her with the kind of look he reserved only for his siblings when they were being less intelligent than him. Vanya and the others saw that look a lot.

“I would pay good money to see Diego _attempt_ to end the world.”

“I bet he could do it if he applied himself.”

Five scoffed before the lights turned black.

“Ah, shit,” he said. He moved to poke his head out from underneath the table, but Vanya held him back. The ground was still shaking and the city was up in arms about it; she could hear it all, focus on every voice, every shout, every car alarm.

They waited under the table until the rumbling stopped, then carefully climbed out.

“Everyone okay?” Luther asked.

They sounded off in turn, and Vanya watched Luther heave Klaus to his feet, while Diego and Allison climbed out from beneath the bar, where they were splashed with liquor that had fallen from the shelves.

“Careful of the glass,” Diego said quietly as they tiptoed out. Vanya was certain that no one had heard him except she and Allison. Sometimes she liked her powers, just a little.

“Power’s out,” Five announced, flicking the light switch a few times for good measure.

“Yeah, all over the city,” Luther said. “Look at _that._ ”

Vanya moved over to the window and stared out beside her siblings; Manhattan was dark. A swath of black towers in the night. Only a few golden beacons remained in the distance, glowing like suns. She took a deep breath; Vanya had never seen New York like this. Never seen it… quiet. Dark.

“Well, what do we do now?” Allison asked.

They stayed quiet and then they got to work.

They couldn’t light up the whole house, but they searched through the dark and found candles, lighters. They lit them until the lounge was soft and yellow, and New York remained a dark sea through the windows.

Vanya caught Allison’s smile and asked, “What?”

“Oh? I just…” she trailed off, looking around the room. Klaus had found a bundle of blankets and thrown them about the couches, and Five had gone searching in the lab with a flashlight for the miniature emergency generator that was now hooked up to Luther’s old record player and sending quiet mid-nineties rock through the room. “We never would have had this… you know, without the apocalypse.”

“I know,” Vanya replied, smiling back.

“Oh, yeah,” Klaus hummed. “Go team; go _apocalypse._ ”

“Mind rephrasing?” Five asked, tuning into the conversation with a crease in his brow.

Allison rolled her eyes. “The apocalypse was _bad._ Very bad. All kinds of bad.”

“Sure.”

“But without it…” she landed heavily on the sofa, curling her bare feet up underneath her, “we’d still be… separate.”

“You think it was all worth it?” Luther asked.

Vanya grabbed a blanket at settled at the floor, near to where Diego had commandeered an entire couch and flung his feet up over the cushions. They had all congregated together in the candle light, and Vanya noted how, even without thinking about it, they’d left a chair open for Ben, even though he was long gone into the light.

“It has to be worth it, right?” Allison replied. “If it wasn’t worth it, then was there a point?”

For a moment, no one replied, then Klaus said, “If the apocalypse hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have met Dave.” He pulled a face and added, “Wouldn’t have lost him, either.”

Diego sighed and tipped his head back. “Patch would still be alive if it weren’t for the apocalypse.”

“And Elliot, Dad…” Luther added.

“I left Ray in the 60s,” Allison said. “He was my—he was _the one,_ and I left him behind.”

“Like Sissy,” Vanya replied, “and Harlan.”

For a moment, they were quiet. The apocalypse, and the one after that, and the one after that – they’d been heartrending and unbearable. They’d been violent and painful and trying. They’d kept coming, no matter what they did or what they tried. And Vanya had been responsible; they’d all been. They’d had to admit that a _long_ time ago; that they’d all had their hands in the apocalypse and they’d all had their chances to make it go differently.

“You ever miss them?” Diego asked, soft. “Like, so much it hurts? Like, like you might open your eyes and they’d still be here?”

Vanya tipped her head back to peer at him, but his eyes were glued to the ceiling, where he wouldn’t have to face his siblings.

“All the time,” Klaus replied. “I got three years with him, but—”

“It wasn’t enough,” Allison interrupted. “Was it? It’ll never be enough. I had two years with Ray and I just—I just keep waking up in the morning and expecting to see him. I think he’ll be there and we’ll go to work, and we’ll talk about the movement and his sister, or, or starting a family.”

“Would you have?” Vanya asked. “Started a family?”

Allison swallowed. “I thought I was never going home,” she replied, eyes on her hands. “I thought I was stranded in time and I’d never see any of you again, never see _Claire_ again. And I loved him— _love_ him. It’s no different to you and Sissy right? Harlan would’ve been yours.”

Vanya was struck with the thought and took a second to picture it in her head, like she had a year before in 1960s. She and Sissy and Harlan, a family. Taking Harlan to live with Sissy’s sister and starting over, just the three of them. She would’ve been a _mother._ Was that right? Was that how it would’ve gone? She’d never thought of herself and _mother_ in the same sentence; the two pieces had never fit right in her head. And yet—

That’s exactly what she would’ve been.

If she’d had more time. If the world hadn’t wanted so badly to end. If her powers had been controllable; if time hadn’t wanted her back in her place.

So Vanya nodded, and then said, “But I only had a month.”

Diego said, “I had ten years, V. It’s never enough.”

Vanya thought about a decade with Sissy and then made herself stop. She thought about Klaus having a decade with Dave, and Allison with Ray, the children they might’ve had together in the 1960s, and then she thought about Diego and Patch, the detective she’d met only once, in the winter she’d been twenty-four, before her book had even been conceived. She’d been there to sign Diego out of jail after a misdemeanour and Patch had been the beautiful brown-skinned woman with the brown leather jacket and sour look when she watched Diego step mournfully out of his cell. There’d been softness there, though; Vanya had heard it in her voice, seen it in the way she’d raised her hand as if to touch his arm and then thought better of it.

She hadn’t seen her dead, either. They’d left the timeline before the funeral and returned to Diego’s outstanding arrest warrant for her murder – a problem they’d solved but not without mess, just like everything they did as a family. She thought about that woman, shot through the back, and Diego, still grieving, still in love, after ten years.

She almost said she was sorry, but then Five said, “A lot of bad things happened to make way for the good things,” like he’d been thinking it over. And maybe he had; they all turned to look at him, sitting on the edge of the couch, his brow furrowed with consideration. “I went through forty years of isolation in the apocalypse. I lost Delores. I became a killer and I assassinated… _so many_ people. I lost every part of myself for the chance of coming back to you guys and fixing the timeline so you’d never have to go through that yourselves. And I failed, for the most part.”

“Five—”

Vanya’s words died in her mouth when he looked at her. “You were isolated for thirty years, Vanya. You too, Luther. You all lost people you cared about, _loved_ even. You’ve all killed and done things that will haunt your nightmares. And you’ve all seen the apocalypse—several times over, in fact.”

“But we’re alive,” Luther said.

Five nodded. “But you’re alive. So maybe the good outweighs the bad.”

The room grew quiet and the silence stretched into the night, into the darkness of New York. Vanya breathed it in; comfortable, meaningful, considering.

Then Diego looked at Five and asked, “Think you’d be able to get the cable working?”

“With the generator? Probably.”

They didn’t want to leave the lounge, though the TV was in the other room, so instead they hung a sheet from the wall and set up the projector from the surveillance room, connecting it to Diego’s laptop. They planned to watch a movie, but first checked the news broadcasts about the power outage, letting it play on the makeshift screen.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Five muttered.

On screen, shaky video footage of a meteor striking a forest in Virginia and the ensuing earthquakes reaching all the way up to New York and knocking out the power.

“Okay,” Klaus said, “who had natural disasters on their 2020 bingo card?”

Vanya cracked a smile.

“Well, I guess the world’s not ending,” Diego said, “so it can’t be Vanya’s fault after all.”

She let out a shocked laugh and punched his shin, which hurt them both equally.

“Do you think we should be helping?” Luther asked.

Five relaxed back on the couch. “Like Diego said: world’s not ending. Let someone else figure it out for a change.”

They all agreed and started up a movie instead.

**Author's Note:**

> it's currently reading week on my degree so i AM reading many books that i don't really care about so that's where i'm at right now, thanks for reading, PLEASE talk to me in the comments. as a note, after whumptober is done you probably won't see me around on ao3 for a WHILE because a) burnout and b) i've got a LOT of original work to catch up on after 70k+ of just fan fic
> 
> however, because outsourcing ideas is working: if u have any ideas for the theme "i think i need a doctor" with the prompts "intubation, emergency room or reluctant bedrest" PLEASE let me know thank u!!!


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